Check this out https://1world2wheels.org/blog/cyclis...-mpg-on-a-bike

Yes, nice article. That first comment from "Chris" though,...

I like it!

It's cute but pointless, as such a comparison still fails on economics. The car eats a lot cheaper than you do.

A gallon of regular unleaded gasoline costs around $3 (midwest US) right now, and contains about 31,000 calories.

Tell me any kind of food you can buy, that $3 worth would contain 31,000 calories.
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Does not equate. I can go 130 miles on about 5000 calories. So, that's roughly 750 miles per 31000 calories I can ingest. Show me a car that can go 750 miles per gallon?

Are humans able to convert those 31,000 calories?

BTW, It's my understanding that the normal conversion of fuels to work it BTU's not calories.

LOL, I used to say I get about 70 miles per hamburger...

I think he missed the distinction between miles per tank, miles per calorie, and miles per gallon. like many people I talk to he seems to think in terms of miles per tank while hardly taking into account the volume of the tank. Shove a big enough tank into a gas guzzling SUV and of course it gets more 'miles per tank' than a 4 cyl econobox with a thimble sized fuel tank.

Re. the article, I thought it was quite good although those heart rate monitors are a very rough estimate of calorie consumtion. Actual consumption varies quite a bit between individuals. I wish he'd had kept a log of his 'fuel' consuption, it would have been interesting to analyse....

Of course.... what do we convert them to? that is a different question

They're different units of energy (not quite work, you need the time component for that) so either one is good if that's your preferred unit. I tend to think in calories even though I was brought up with SI units..... just have to remember that a dietary calorie is 1,000 regular calories.

The 31,000 calories remark doesn't make a ton of sense; one of the fundamental purposes of the bike is to massively reduce the amount of weight being pushed around.

Separately, the cost of a car isn't the gas, it's the insurance, parking, and maintenence. Gas is less than 1/3 of the total cost of going a mile.

I agree that the measurement method should have been changed to calories consumed and not those calculated based on heart rate... however, an interesting "experiment" just the same... at least as far as making an interesting article.

I would say that food consumption would be a better measure, but then you would have to subtract out some number of calories for normal metabolism... or maybe not, since it would honestly show the disadvantage of the cyclist, and that is that it consumes fuel whether moving or not.